1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate to opportunistic media patching for a communication session.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless communication systems have developed through various generations, including a first-generation analog wireless phone service (1G), a second-generation (2G) digital wireless phone service (including interim 2.5G and 2.75G networks) and third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) high speed data/Internet-capable wireless services. There are presently many different types of wireless communication systems in use, including Cellular and Personal Communications Service (PCS) systems. Examples of known cellular systems include the cellular Analog Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), and digital cellular systems based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), the Global System for Mobile access (GSM) variation of TDMA, and newer hybrid digital communication systems using both TDMA and CDMA technologies.
More recently, Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been developed as a wireless communications protocol for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and other data terminals. LTE is based on GSM, and includes contributions from various GSM-related protocols such as Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) protocols such as High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA).
In any of the aforementioned communication protocols, user equipments (UEs) can engage in communication sessions with other UEs whereby media (e.g., audio media, video media, etc.) is exchanged and played in ‘real-time’. In real-time communication sessions, the value of media drops precipitously as time (e.g., mere seconds of tenths of a second) goes by. For example, audio data (e.g., one or more audio frames) contained in an audio packet received during a phone call typically need to be played relatively soon (e.g., 100-200 ms) after receipt by a target UE, or else the audio data will not have relevance to the phone call. Also, if the audio packet is lost during the phone call, it can take a relatively long time (e.g., several seconds) to re-obtain the lost audio packet (e.g., from the speaker or a server that archives audio packets for the phone call). To mitigate packet loss during real-time communication sessions, mechanisms such as forward error correction (FER) or interleaving are used. However, in the event that media packets (such as the audio packet in the preceding example) are lost during a real-time communication session, the target UE typically allows the real-time communication session to continue without attempting to recover media that was contained in the lost media packets due to the expectation that this media will not be relevant upon its eventual arrival if recovery were attempted.